In this stage we will hire workers such as drivers, sales reps, a manager, etc.
We will also find businesses with excessive parking spaces across the local area to partner with us and allow us to use their parking spaces for our customers to park at and to be a pick up and drop off point.
Inbound Logistics - Finance Equipment
In this stage we will go to our vendors and buy buses, GPS devices servers, uniforms, office essentials, etc.
Operations - Set up Equipment
Here we will set up our systems and job roles as well as company policy's. We will also train our employees to use their required systems.
Marketing and Sales
Here we will market our services through UTPA using flyers, websites, and other means of advertising. A buyer will then get in contact with a sales rep to buy our Park and Ride service. The buyer will then provide his or her information and schedule in order to best accommodate his or her schedule. All of this will go into our database and GPS systems for our drivers to see.
Service
Here we will finally provide our services to our customer by picking them up and dropping them off at UTPA according to their schedules. Schedules can be changes daily by the customers at our website before a certain hour. This will take care of some of the parking issues at UTPA.
Payroll
Here our manager will calculate the hours according to the time clock and pay our employees
Finance
Begin to pay off the bank loan.
Core Competency
There is no other business that offers this efficient service to pick up students outside of the campus on time and in a systematic manor by utilizing the technology of GPS and Schedules.
Competitive Forces
Threat of Entrants
Since there will be no other business that is like ours, our profits will be high. New entrants will see that opportunity and will attract new firms.
Threat of Substitutes
Students may not want to rely on our service as their priority to get to school and would rather use substitutes such as their own car or to ride with another friend an alternative.
Students may also find it cheaper to do something else than to use our service
Power of Buyers
Students are the buyers in our business
They have the power if they threaten to use another service, which would drive our prices down and also the number of buyers. If we have a lot, then one individual won’t drive our prices down, but if we only have a few, they can affect it.
Their power might be weak if we can show that switching to our service saves them money compared to others
Power of Suppliers
The manufacturers or companies that supply our business can also affect the business prices
They could charge us higher prices or they can also choose to supply a different business.
Industry Competitiveness
Our business has a core competency that no other business is doing right now, so our strength is high since there aren’t really any other business’ competing with us.
Once other businesses see the profits we will be making, there will likely be new entrants and that is what we will have someone to compete with. Depending on the price of their service compared to ours, will depend on the type of actions our business will have to take.
Ethical Issues
Our Park and Ride business will be using the GPS in order to collect information of our customers. These GPS information will then be seen by our bus drivers who are not known to our customers. Is it right to share our customers GPS information with people that we don't know?
In this situation, the stakeholders would be our customers who are UTPA students.
Given our situation, students GPS information is a necessity. Therefore, it is best to be open about what we will do to our customers information.
With this in mind, we have decided to use users agreement method. Users agreement will be given to students as soon as they sign up to be our customer. In this users agreement, we will inform the students about our purpose of collecting our customers information. Once the student agrees to this, a sign up form will be provided.
Database
In our database model, we will be starting off with two database entities: Employee and Client:
Employee:
Primary Key: EmployeeID (numeric)
First Name (text)
Last Name (text)
DoB (date)
Address (text)
Client:
Primary Key: Client ID (numeric)
First Name (text)
Last Name (text)
DoB (date)
Address(text)
PickupLocation (text)
PickupTime (text)
Data Roles:
Information Owners: Park and Ride Administration
Information Custodians: IT Director
End Users: Customer Service (data entry)
Hierarchical Structure
Customer Relationship Management
Phone Numbers
Locations
Name
Credit Card Numbers
Income
Payment Plan
Customer# (pk)
DoB
Student ID
Major
Satisfaction Levels
Favorite Music
General Interests for Ads
Gender
Ethnicity
Marital Status
Zip Code
Cutting Edge IT
1. MySQL
This is a database management system (DBMS) that is open source, widely available, and less expensive than most to use. It would benefit both consumers and the company in its two functions. It would benefit the company in its implementation for business management and human resources, and it would benefit customers when used on the website to manage their payment accounts and find routes.
It will provide significant cost savings over paper management in both time, staff resources, and material resources. While there are higher fixed startup costs in the form of servers and space, there is significant cost savings in the long run in the form of much less variable costs, faster data entry, easier data manipulation, more types of data analysis, and no growing physical space requirements.
When used online, it significantly improves customer relations management by allowing customers to be able to update payment and other information online without needing to call customer support. This would also provide cost savings due to the decreased traffic of callers to phone support and office visits. The innovation of having an electronic payment option would give a very large bonus over traditional bus cash payments or buying tickets with machines, where instead you can have an online refillable card to pay your fares with paypal, a credit/debit card, or direct draw from bank account.
This technology supports our core strategy above through the lowering of costs and increase in convenience to students. Students, who are already low on funds, need solutions at the lowest costs possible.
2. Mobile Website
By making a mobile-friendly website, it is device unspecific, so an interface can be made that works on all major devices rather than coding an app to work for each individual device type.
The difference between a mobile website and traditional website viewable on PC is mainly optimum resolution. While typically a normal website is designed for display on a screen with a larger than 1024 x 768 resolution, mobile devices typically have much smaller screen resolutions. This comes into issue when viewing a website, the user would have to scroll back and forth in both vertical and horizontal directions to see everything on the page, which becomes annoying when reading. By implementing a mobile website in addition to a traditional one, it promotes use on mobile appliances for users without full screen resolution access.
A mobile website will target the customer relations side of business. This implementation will significantly increase customer satisfaction due to the fact that they can get all service-related information on the go. It would also be setup with the database so that customers could access their account on mobile devices in case they need to add more credits to their account on a last minute basis.
This technology supports the need of customer relations through convenience. Because college students are very mobile and may have little access to a computer on the way between classes and work, a lot of them do have an internet-capable phone, and with the inclusion of a mobile website, they are able to keep up with information relating to their routes as well as their payment information.
3. GPS (Global Positioning System)
A Global Positioning System (GPS) implementation involves having a tracking device embedded in the fleet of buses for the benefit of business management and customers. GPS works by having a receiver triangulate its location by connecting to 4 or more GPS satellites. These satellites are precisely timed to know where they are at all times with respect to earth and provide other information such as highly precise time and other location information.
This implementation would help the business management in several areas. The GPS locators, paired with transmitters would allow the command center to know where each bus is at all times, thus in the event of a carjacking, it could be tracked in realtime to a specific location. Aside from theft countermeasure, GPS would provide as a valuable resource in the area of route planning. By gathering realtime location data over a period of time, it can be found where the bus moves fastest and slowest, and path efficiency can be found (ie: is there a path that would be more efficient on resources, faster, or that can service more customers). This data would be used for the route planners to find the best paths to take and the optimum places to setup a bus stop. In addition to this, the customers would also benefit from GPS. While providing specific locations of buses at all times may be a security issue, the website could show the bus’s ETA (estimated time of arrival) to a particular stop, so the customers know when they need to be at their specific pickup location.
This implementation works toward the strategy of customer relations. By providing customers with up-to-date ETA information on possible delays or changes in route schedules, they don’t have to waste their time waiting around the bus stop or can find out on the go what time to be at their stop if they need to take a different route from usual that day. In the realm of business management, it is a heavily value-added package. If a bus is stolen or has unauthorized access, the cost savings of recovery far outweighs the cost of the implementation. Gas and other resources are also saved when using GPS for route planning.
The Business Plan
Finance
Speak to a bank to request a loan for business.Operations - Hiring Workers and Finding Partners
In this stage we will hire workers such as drivers, sales reps, a manager, etc.
We will also find businesses with excessive parking spaces across the local area to partner with us and allow us to use their parking spaces for our customers to park at and to be a pick up and drop off point.Inbound Logistics - Finance Equipment
In this stage we will go to our vendors and buy buses, GPS devices servers, uniforms, office essentials, etc.Operations - Set up Equipment
Here we will set up our systems and job roles as well as company policy's. We will also train our employees to use their required systems.Marketing and Sales
Here we will market our services through UTPA using flyers, websites, and other means of advertising. A buyer will then get in contact with a sales rep to buy our Park and Ride service. The buyer will then provide his or her information and schedule in order to best accommodate his or her schedule. All of this will go into our database and GPS systems for our drivers to see.Service
Here we will finally provide our services to our customer by picking them up and dropping them off at UTPA according to their schedules. Schedules can be changes daily by the customers at our website before a certain hour. This will take care of some of the parking issues at UTPA.Payroll
Here our manager will calculate the hours according to the time clock and pay our employeesFinance
Begin to pay off the bank loan.Core Competency
There is no other business that offers this efficient service to pick up students outside of the campus on time and in a systematic manor by utilizing the technology of GPS and Schedules.
Competitive Forces
Threat of Entrants
- Since there will be no other business that is like ours, our profits will be high. New entrants will see that opportunity and will attract new firms.
Threat of Substitutes- Students may not want to rely on our service as their priority to get to school and would rather use substitutes such as their own car or to ride with another friend an alternative.
- Students may also find it cheaper to do something else than to use our service
Power of Buyers- Students are the buyers in our business
- They have the power if they threaten to use another service, which would drive our prices down and also the number of buyers. If we have a lot, then one individual won’t drive our prices down, but if we only have a few, they can affect it.
- Their power might be weak if we can show that switching to our service saves them money compared to others
Power of Suppliers- The manufacturers or companies that supply our business can also affect the business prices
- They could charge us higher prices or they can also choose to supply a different business.
Industry CompetitivenessEthical Issues
Our Park and Ride business will be using the GPS in order to collect information of our customers. These GPS information will then be seen by our bus drivers who are not known to our customers. Is it right to share our customers GPS information with people that we don't know?
In this situation, the stakeholders would be our customers who are UTPA students.
Given our situation, students GPS information is a necessity. Therefore, it is best to be open about what we will do to our customers information.
With this in mind, we have decided to use users agreement method. Users agreement will be given to students as soon as they sign up to be our customer. In this users agreement, we will inform the students about our purpose of collecting our customers information. Once the student agrees to this, a sign up form will be provided.
Database
In our database model, we will be starting off with two database entities: Employee and Client:
Employee:
Client:
Data Roles:
Hierarchical Structure
Customer Relationship Management
Cutting Edge IT
1. MySQL
This is a database management system (DBMS) that is open source, widely available, and less expensive than most to use. It would benefit both consumers and the company in its two functions. It would benefit the company in its implementation for business management and human resources, and it would benefit customers when used on the website to manage their payment accounts and find routes.
It will provide significant cost savings over paper management in both time, staff resources, and material resources. While there are higher fixed startup costs in the form of servers and space, there is significant cost savings in the long run in the form of much less variable costs, faster data entry, easier data manipulation, more types of data analysis, and no growing physical space requirements.
When used online, it significantly improves customer relations management by allowing customers to be able to update payment and other information online without needing to call customer support. This would also provide cost savings due to the decreased traffic of callers to phone support and office visits. The innovation of having an electronic payment option would give a very large bonus over traditional bus cash payments or buying tickets with machines, where instead you can have an online refillable card to pay your fares with paypal, a credit/debit card, or direct draw from bank account.
This technology supports our core strategy above through the lowering of costs and increase in convenience to students. Students, who are already low on funds, need solutions at the lowest costs possible.
2. Mobile Website
By making a mobile-friendly website, it is device unspecific, so an interface can be made that works on all major devices rather than coding an app to work for each individual device type.
The difference between a mobile website and traditional website viewable on PC is mainly optimum resolution. While typically a normal website is designed for display on a screen with a larger than 1024 x 768 resolution, mobile devices typically have much smaller screen resolutions. This comes into issue when viewing a website, the user would have to scroll back and forth in both vertical and horizontal directions to see everything on the page, which becomes annoying when reading. By implementing a mobile website in addition to a traditional one, it promotes use on mobile appliances for users without full screen resolution access.
A mobile website will target the customer relations side of business. This implementation will significantly increase customer satisfaction due to the fact that they can get all service-related information on the go. It would also be setup with the database so that customers could access their account on mobile devices in case they need to add more credits to their account on a last minute basis.
This technology supports the need of customer relations through convenience. Because college students are very mobile and may have little access to a computer on the way between classes and work, a lot of them do have an internet-capable phone, and with the inclusion of a mobile website, they are able to keep up with information relating to their routes as well as their payment information.
3. GPS (Global Positioning System)
A Global Positioning System (GPS) implementation involves having a tracking device embedded in the fleet of buses for the benefit of business management and customers. GPS works by having a receiver triangulate its location by connecting to 4 or more GPS satellites. These satellites are precisely timed to know where they are at all times with respect to earth and provide other information such as highly precise time and other location information.
This implementation would help the business management in several areas. The GPS locators, paired with transmitters would allow the command center to know where each bus is at all times, thus in the event of a carjacking, it could be tracked in realtime to a specific location. Aside from theft countermeasure, GPS would provide as a valuable resource in the area of route planning. By gathering realtime location data over a period of time, it can be found where the bus moves fastest and slowest, and path efficiency can be found (ie: is there a path that would be more efficient on resources, faster, or that can service more customers). This data would be used for the route planners to find the best paths to take and the optimum places to setup a bus stop. In addition to this, the customers would also benefit from GPS. While providing specific locations of buses at all times may be a security issue, the website could show the bus’s ETA (estimated time of arrival) to a particular stop, so the customers know when they need to be at their specific pickup location.
This implementation works toward the strategy of customer relations. By providing customers with up-to-date ETA information on possible delays or changes in route schedules, they don’t have to waste their time waiting around the bus stop or can find out on the go what time to be at their stop if they need to take a different route from usual that day. In the realm of business management, it is a heavily value-added package. If a bus is stolen or has unauthorized access, the cost savings of recovery far outweighs the cost of the implementation. Gas and other resources are also saved when using GPS for route planning.